Book review: The sordid and confused spy world of an unfaithful vassal in sixties Britain

Alex Grant's 'Sex, Spies and Scandal' could be seen as a comedy of manners built around the steely realities of the last Cold War 

John Vassall spent a decade in jail for spying unable to understand why so many others got away. File picture: Evening Standard/Getty Images

• Sex, Spies and Scandal: The John Vassall Affair 
• Alex Grant 
• Biteback Publishing, €25.00 

In another world, in a less fraught time Sex, Spies and Scandal might have been called Carry On Spying.

It is a tale, intricately told, of gross incompetence, imagined but wildly unjustified exceptionalism, the shallowness of the bewildered, social climbing on a Kardashian scale, unrealistic ambition, petite bourgeoisie foolishness and the slow collapse of an imperial civil service eviscerated by two world wars.

It is also, most importantly, the tale of one vulnerable man’s tremendous naivety and destruction. 

If the stakes were not so very high, it might be described as a romp through London’s pinstriped clubland, maybe a chaps’ jape involving a myriad of secretly gay parliamentarians.

It might also be seen as a comedy of manners built around the steely realities of the last Cold War and the inevitably sad fate of those unequal to the hard ball realpolitik of the day.

From today’s inclusive perspective, barely a lifetime after the events described in tremendous detail by Alex Grant, the book is a way marker showing how very far we have come from the cruelties alive just 60 years ago when a person’s sexuality could condemn them to a life of shadows, default denial and all too often blackmail. 

In today’s terms, Vassall and his peers lived in a society that institutionalised homophobia and all the brutalities that facilitated.

After Vassall was uncovered in the early 1960s, and because his employers seemed utterly blind to his joyfully active homosexuality and the professional vulnerabilities that implied in those dark times, the Sunday Mirror felt pressed to provide what it may have regarded as a badly needed public service. 

In April, 1963 that champion of free speech and decency told its readers “How To Spot A Possible Homo” because “The Admiralty, the Foreign Office and M15 don’t seem to know …”. 

Had that paper’s reportage been more comprehensive, more accurate and less driven by John Bull jingoism — the nasty, Brexit kind — it might have also told its readers “How To Spot A Possible Spy” because “The Admiralty, the Foreign Office and M15 don’t seem to know …”.

Vassall, despite living at a plush address well beyond his means, despite a hectic romantic life, endless foreign travel, and spectacular tailors’ bills all while living on a pitiful salary did not invite the kind of suspicion any parish pump gossip would feel and happily share.

He was, incredibly, not rumbled until a Soviet defector told American spooks that he had been photographed at a gay Moscow orgy while working as a minor clerk in Her Majesty’s embassy.

One of the great questions left by the book is how a person as vain and weak as Vassall was appointed to a position that afforded him access to intelligence envied by the KGB. As ever, or so it seems, one old boys’ network or another was responsible. 

One of those networks opened doors in London when Vassall’s Moscow posting ended and allowed him to continue spying, albeit a reluctant and increasingly unhappy one.

Vassall’s world is gone. Today’s espionage is virtual rather than hard copy, but it still depends on individuals living double lives. Are they harder or easier to uncover?

Another great question left by Grant, despite almost monthly spy scandals at that time, is how many Soviet spies — or those working against the Soviet Union — evaded detection and retired to their country garden? 

As many proportionately as the double dealing Provos in our recent history? That question underlines a profound cultural difference. The Soviets, once a Russian spying for a foreign power was rumbled, like the Provos, immediately executed that sorry individual. 

Western powers were more circumspect, and Vassal spent a decade in jail before resuming a pleasant life unsettled by his inability to understand why he went to jail when so many others he imagined as guilty as himself lived out happy lives.

It might be, in a country that shamefully spends just 0.2% of its income on defence, tempting to dismiss the conflict that ensnared Vassall as historic but as any Ukrainian or Estonian might warn that’s not really an option unless you are prepared to risk all. Are you?

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